The Blacks of Premodern China. Don J. Wyatt

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СКАЧАТЬ ignoring the occasional differences, such as wavy versus curly or kinky hair. This common physical denominator, shared to one degree or another by all, was their relative blackness.

      Chinese successes over time in enslaving the kunlun seem not to have relaxed the compulsion for doing so. During the first half of the sixteenth century Chinese merchants involved in trade with the newest foreigners—by this time Europeans such as the Portuguese and the Spanish—employed the kunlun of Melaka not only as laborers but also on occasion as go-between interpreters. Moreover, for their part, by the latter half of the same century, when they began gradually but more copiously to trickle into the empire, China’s European visitors were hardly remiss in emulating the willful pattern of subjugation of their hosts. We may take as a prime example the Italian Matteo Ricci (1552–1610),⁷⁵ the first and greatest of the Jesuit fathers in China. In the years before acquiring his legendary mastery of Chinese, Ricci relied on native blacks (Malays?) as interpreters and imported blacks (Africans?) as servants—that is, before he was eventually compelled to change over to Chinese for both purposes upon learning and coming to appreciate that, as the historian Jonathan Spence relates it, “these blacks frightened the Chinese.”⁷⁶ This observation by Spence is doubly revealing. On the one hand, it is reflective of the fact that blacks—understood by our definition as probably Malays—were commonplace enough throughout late sixteenth-century Chinese society as to provoke little comment in the indigenous literature. However, on the other hand, it reflects the fact that there must also simultaneously have existed blacks of African extraction in China, for why else would the natives be “frightened” by them? In other words, the only logical way of explaining the fear evoked in the hearts of Ricci’s Chinese contacts at the sight of peoples by this point ostensibly so familiar is to acknowledge that they were actually not that familiar, not at all kunlun of some customary stock but instead those who were just as much products of imagination as they were of reality.

      Such, then, were the meager limits to which the Chinese perception of blacks had, by the end of the premodern era, progressed. In the end, one can justifiably quibble with whether, in the Chinese context, blackness, as Dikötter claims, “had always been a symbolic expression for slavery.”⁷⁷ After all, other scholars, such as Raymond Dawson, have argued that chief among the Chinese distinguishing criteria between civilization and barbarism was neither social nor political organization, neither religion nor race, but instead cultural attainment.⁷⁸ However, this argument is most compelling only when applied to the dealings of the Chinese with peoples, such as even the customary kunlun of probable Malay ethnicity, whose racial constitutions they perceived as not differing altogether drastically from their own, and it becomes far less compelling when we extend it to what would be the future encounters between Chinese and Africans. Yet, these contentions notwithstanding, the fact remains that by the time the Chinese had genuinely established contact with and developed a true cognizance of the peoples of Africa, the “symbolic expression” to which Dikötter refers, whereby they had come to equate blackness fully and categorically with slavery, had already been well in place and robustly intact for a period of considerable duration. Sadly, it would endure for centuries, and its legacy lingers with us even now.

      CHAPTER TWO

      The Slaves of Guangzhou

      FROM WHAT HAS preceded, the southeastern coastal city of Guangzhou has already emerged as a pivotal locale, for it serves as a conspicuous nexus for helping to further not only our knowledge of the circumstances of China’s premodern “blacks” but also our understanding of their situation in relation to the Chinese institution of slavery. What follows is an exposition and analysis of what—apart from the official histories—appears to be the only nonfictional source within the slim body of available evidence that strongly suggests the substantial presence of what we by convention would deem to have been racially or ethnically black slaves inside middle-period China.¹ As the late scholar C. Martin Wilbur prosaically observed: “Foreign slaves were very popular with the cosmopolitan upper classes of the [Tang] period…. Dark-skinned [kunlun] slaves, certainly negroid, were very popular; references to them go back to the fourth and fifth centuries. In [Tang] times some [kunlun] slaves may have been African negroes imported by Arab traders.”²

      The account of the surprising existence and servitude of such slaves of African origin as Wilbur describes presents us with their circumstances during the succeeding era of the Song period. Constituting more clusters or groupings of discrete individuals than real colonies, these slaves were by no means geographically dispersed across China but preponderantly aggregated in only one place, what was already by then the populous coastal locality of Guangzhou. This site, if recognized by latter-day Westerners at all, was—until remarkably recently—far better known in later centuries by the peculiar imperialist corruption of a name it came to bear, Canton. (See Figure 2.)³ The record on which I rely and which affords this discerning description—the earliest and most extensive privately written one of which I am aware—is called Pingzhou ketan (Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile), a relatively short work in three Chinese scrolls or fascicles called juan, which serve functionally as chapters.⁴ Its author was a scholar and minor official of the Song Dynasty named Zhu Yu (1075?–after 1119).⁵

Figure 2. Map of Guangzhou and environs in Qiu Juchuan, ed., Yangcheng guchao [Ancient Documents on Yangcheng], vol. 1. (ca. 1800; repr., Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1969), 65–66.

      However, at the same time that I hope to exploit this crucial text, I am also compelled to begin with a cautionary caveat. Even when pored over and mined exhaustively, Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile offers us a picture of eleventh-century Guangzhou’s black slaves that is still far less complete than any of us might like to have, and anyone who anticipates a description extracted from this source that is either definitive or conclusive is destined to be roundly disappointed. On the contrary, the description is neither precise nor expansive; the depth of detail that we as moderns desire to have and to which we have grown accustomed to expecting is simply not forthcoming; the resultant portrait hardly surpasses being much more than a fragmentary and fragile allusion. Thus, on the one hand, my own inclination to bring this description to light is interlaced with and tempered by ambivalence about its ultimate value. By my assessment, the description afforded is yet another classic example of one of those all-too-frequently-encountered and all-too-vexing discoveries that, for the historian, raises perhaps even more questions than it does answer. However, on the other hand, if our knowledge about the shadowy intersections in the histories of disparate cultural zones—specifically two such zones that are conventionally interpreted as having been so disparate as Africa and China—is to be advanced at all, then the description of the black slaves of China offered in Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile deserves greater exposure than it has heretofore had, for it surely represents one that is worth the telling.

      Of Text and Context

      For someone so well positioned as a potential participant within the mainstream of the civil service ideal of the Song period, Zhu Yu, the author of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile, remains a man about whom we know painfully little. Although known to have hailed from the region that is now modern coastal Zhejiang Province, an area that supplied many of the state’s bureaucrats from mid-Song times onward, no record mentions that Zhu Yu ever served in an official capacity. This situation forces us to conclude that he was never elevated—either through the channel of the civil service examinations or by recommendation—to any official post.⁶ Thus, in the case of Zhu Yu, one of the most reliable portals for our acquiring in-depth knowledge about the lives of even relatively minor Song figures—that is, a career of any duration as an officeholder—is unavailable to us.

      However, this dearth of knowledge about the author of Pingzhou Chats on Things Worthwhile as an independent personality is not fatal, for it СКАЧАТЬ